Martha Roby Thinks Her Voters are Idiots

Representative Martha Roby is facing a primary challenge from tea-party hero Becky Gerritson in Alabama. It is shaping up as one of this election cycle’s top opportunities to remove one of John Boehner’s most reliable votes these last few years. Not surprisingly, Roby has a terrible record and is having a hard time defending it.

Roby voted to fund President Obama’s executive amnesty in December of 2014, in supporting the $1.1 trillion “cromnibus” bill. She claimed that it did not include amnesty because there was no specific line item for “amnesty.” But that is not how spending bills are written. Spending bills provide large pots of money to the government agencies to spend. Congress must then attach funding limitations or “riders” to the bills to ensure that the agencies cannot spending the money on certain activities. Defunding hinges entirely on the rider. Roby either knows this and is misleading her constituents or is herself ignorant of how Congress works. Other Alabamans like Jeff Sessions and Mo Brooks knew this and voted against amnesty.

Roby then claimed that she did not “want a ‘moral victory’ on defeating amnesty. I want a real victory, and the best way to get one is with a Republican Senate Majority.” Well, a Republican Senate Majority did not matter. Earlier this year the Republican Congress voted to extend funding for the president’s amnesty for the entire year. Boehner was able to rely heavily on Democrat votes. He did not need Roby’s vote. But prior to that vote, when House conservatives were still fighting, there was a very revealing vote on a short-term bill to fund amnesty. (It also funded Planned Parenthood and the current refugee program that is now arranging for the Syrian resettlement.) Roby voted for it. She was not one of the 52 conservatives who stood strong. I would say that she played the fool, but her vote against House conservatives gives evidence that she was encouraging the result all along.

Now let’s consider a recent high-profile bill that expedited the entirety of Obama’s agenda. Roby appears at first glance to have voted properly, but there is more than meets the eye when you look closely at her record. Congress recently passed the “zombie” budget to increase the debt limit through the rest of Obama’s term ($1.5 trillion!) and give him free reign. The bill also increased the budget caps to allow for $112 billion in new future spending, much of it to occur in December when another large spending bill will fund Planned Parenthood, executive amnesty, Syrian refugee resettlement, and every other liberal priority. Everything the Democrats wanted, they got. They voted in unison along with 79 Republicans.

But how did this zombie budget get to the floor? Isn’t the House controlled by Republicans? In the House, most bills require a special procedural “rule vote” first that governs how a bill will be considered. A vote on the rule literally brings the bill to the floor. House Leadership has managed for years to convince its members that these are just “procedural” votes, but procedure is policy. The longest serving congressman ever, John Dingell, once said, “If you let me write the procedure and I let you write the substance, I’ll [beat] you every time.” Leadership knows this and convinces their ignorant drones that procedural votes must be party line votes “or Democrats would have control of the floor.” This is not true procedurally, but there is an easy way to spot the hoax. By voting for the rule, Republicans were voting to consider a bill that Democrats overwhelmingly supported and 167 Republicans claimed to oppose. How is that Republicans retaining control of the House of Representatives?

Of course, even though Roby claimed to oppose the zombie budget, she voted for the rule. Mo Brooks, Jim Jordan, and most of the House Freedom Caucus voted against the rule.

While Roby is attacking her for being “woefully uninformed on congressional procedure,” its Becky Gerritson who knows exactly how the Washington DC cartel works and is trying to expose it to voters. Take a visit to Becky’s website, contribute a few dollars, and help ensure that Roby does not get away with misinforming her constituents.

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Erick Erickson

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